Ziska eBook

Denzil looked straight at him, biting his lips hard
and clenching his hands in the effort to keep down
some evidently violent emotion.

“The Princess Ziska,” he began,—­

Gervase smiled, and flicked the ash off his cigarette.

“The Princess Ziska,” he echoed,—­“Yes?
What of her? She seems to be the only person
talked about in Cairo. Everybody in this hotel,
at any rate, begins conversation with precisely the
same words as you do,—­’the Princess
Ziska!’ Upon my life, it is very amusing!”

“It is not amusing to me,” said Denzil,
bitterly. “To me it is a matter of life
and death.” He paused, and Gervase looked
at him curiously. “We’ve always been
such good friends, Gervase,” he continued, “that
I should be sorry if anything came between us now,
so I think it is better to make a clean breast of it
and speak out plainly.” Again he hesitated,
his face growing still paler, then with a sudden ardent
light glowing in his eyes he said—­“Gervase,
I love the Princess Ziska!”

Gervase threw away his cigarette and laughed aloud
with a wild hilarity.

“My good boy, I am very sorry for you!
Sorry, too, for myself! I deplore the position
in which we are placed with all my heart and soul.
It is unfortunate, but it seems inevitable. You
love the Princess Ziska,—­and by all the
gods of Egypt and Christendom, so do I!”

CHAPTER IV.

Denzil recoiled a step backward, then with an impulsive
movement strode close up to him, his face unnaturally
flushed and his eyes glittering with an evil fire.

“You—­you love her! What!—­in
one short hour, you—­who have often boasted
to me of having no heart, no eyes for women except
as models for your canvas,—­you say now
that you love a woman whom you have never seen before
to-night!”

“Stop!” returned Gervase somewhat moodily,
“I am not so sure about that. I have
seen her before, though where I cannot tell. But
the fire that stirs my pulses now seems to spring
from some old passion suddenly revived, and the eyes
of the woman we are both mad for—­well!
they do not inspire holiness, my dear friend!
No,—­ neither in you nor in me! Let
us be honest with each other. There is something
vile in the composition of Madame la Princesse, and
it responds to something equally vile in ourselves.
We shall be dragged down by the force of it,—­tant
pis pour nous! I am sorrier for you than for
myself, for you are a good fellow, au fond; you have
what the world is learning to despise—­sentiment.
I have none; for as I told you before, I have no heart,
but I have passions—­tigerish ones—­which
must be humored; in fact, I make it my business in
life to humor them.”

“Do you intend to humor them in this instance?”

“Assuredly! If I can.”

“Then,—­friend as you have been, you
can be friend no more,” said Denzil fiercely.
“My God! Do you not understand? My
blood is as warm as yours,—­I will not yield
to you one smile, one look from Ziska! No!—­I
will kill you first!”